no longer home

 I am home. For the first time in a couple of years, I have had the time to wander the town, to reacquaint myself with it. And as expected of a returner, I find everything hopelessly changed. Cochin is no longer my city, nor Tripunithura my town. I wonder at it, at the change and at the nature of it, and my reaction to it all. For it is not merely physical; the change is in my relation to these things of my childhood.

There are physical changes, obviously. Ten, fifteen years ago, I knew everybody within a five mile radius of my house. Not only the people, knew all the animals, the trees (mango and tamarind especially, though we climbed all without discrimination), the earth (the dusty brown summer earth, the moist fragrant red monsoon earth, dark hard caked winter earth), the houses and their ponds. In their place, now there are palaces of concrete and monstrosities of glass and steel (forgive me, Howard Roark) - apartment buildings built or being built, shops, malls. People have settled here, and are still pouring in, whom I know nothing of. Those I walked and played and swam with are all gone, building their lives elsewhere, much like me.

More than this physical change, I feel it in the (for lack of an appropriate word) culture. The small town I grew up in was really a small town. Our connections began and ended within its boundaries. Any city that wasn't Cochin was the object of round-eyed contemplation, anything with its roots outside of its purview was strange and big. Not even that, really. All of that was outside our scope of contemplation; it neither touched nor affected our lives. Our only real connection to worlds outside was the people we knew, elder ones who had migrated, cousins and other relatives who came visiting. Perhaps that makes our lives narrow? Perhaps they were narrow, but that is not to say they were not happy. The happinesses and sadnesses we felt here were the same as I see in those other cities. Causes, factors, justifications - these differ, certainly, in scale and volume, but the essence is the same.

I can't say it any other way, but my town has become big. Too big for me to recognise, too big for the child in me to reconcile with.

I do recognise that these changes are necessary. Nor do I wish for my town to remain stagnant, as it was when I was ten. That would be presumptuous and unwise. Only this: that I no longer have roots here, and this is no longer my home but for my parents' presence. My friends, my school, the things I did when I was here - all of that is gone. A sadness there, certainly. But then again, my little town is in my head - glorified and romanticised beyond sorrow, and I can ask for nothing else.